Hmm...wish I could help you with the ostrich feather question. I've only ordered for one so far and it won't arrive for a while. I've never worked with ostrich feathers either.

But I'll be happy to share some links I've found:

Here's the doll hair site I found. I haven't attached the hair yet, since the puppet I'm making doesn't have a head yet. (the first head's kinda too lumpy and big so I'm making a second one).

But the hair I ordered was called the "Synthetic Fancy Curls" and just taking it out of the package, there's a LOT of movement to it! If you want a puppet that's energetic, this hair might do the trick. Depending on the size of the puppet head, you might have to order maybe three or four "hanks" of it.

I'm not sure about the other kinds of hair and how well they'd work, but at the bottom of the page, there's some brightly colored synthetic hair in colors like blue, green and yellow, which might work for something, and some fuzzy optic fiber stuff at the very bottom of the page.

I've only looked at the following sites a couple times, so I don't know if these would be any help or not, but I'll post 'em anyway:

For those of us who can't build puppets but want to buy some decent quality puppets there is a really nice sale over at puppet productions... They have their 119.00 puppets onsale for 39.67 (don't know how long this sale will last)

And this is American Science and Surplus. When I lived in Chicago, I would go to the store and just wander up and down the aisles, always finding something I could use (gasket rubber, foam balls, fishing floats, weird but cool stuff that I still haven't figured out what to do with yet).

Here some good siteshttp://www.onewaystreet.comThey made my puppet Beltar(check My Avatar) Good expensive puppets and ok cheaper oneshttp://www.sagecraft.com/puppetry/
basically this site has everything you need to know about puppets even though it hasn't been up dated in 3 years scroll down check out PUPPET BUILDING and PUPPET BUILDER AND SELLERS, VERY VERYHELPFUL!